The present invention relates to a method and a system for updating software of a cellular phone, and more specifically, to a method and a system for updating software of a cellular phone by comparing data version numbers.
Due to undergoing production, development, maintenance or customer service, a cellular phone manufacturer usually increases or improves functionality of the cellular phone by updating software stored in the cellular phone. In general, the above-mentioned software contains a program and data. A method for updating software according to the related art is to load a required program into the cellular phone, so that the original program in the cellular phone is updated using the required program. In the conventional method, new data are loaded to overwrite all original data stored in the cellular phone. However, the new data are mostly empty data, like a predetermined logical value “1” or “0” that does not record any valid information. Hence, while updating, all the original data is deleted, even some of the original data is totally unrelated to the program update.
In other words, in most cases, most data originally stored in a cellular phone is unrelated to the program update, which means the data unrelated to the program update can be utilized by a new version of the program (the updated program). This data includes, for example, settings/parameters about circuit components of a cellular phone, settings originally inputted by a user and data of a phone book of a cellular phone. Taking settings/parameters about circuit components of a cellular phone as an example, wherein different circuit components may be supplied by different manufacturers. Even for a specific type of circuit component supplied by the same manufacturer, there may be some slight differences between components because of production factors. Hence, before marketing a cellular phone, it is necessary to spend time adjusting all circuit components of the cellular phone to ensure that all circuit components can function properly. In addition, for settings originally inputted into a cellular phone by a user, such as languages utilized in the user interface and data of a phone book, it is undesirable to ask a user to spend more time inputting these original settings into the cellular phone again. Therefore, the above-mentioned original data unrelated to a new version of a program should not to be deleted. In most cases, just little original data needs to be deleted or modified for a new version of the program. However, the conventional software update process always loads all new data that records default values. All original data stored in a cellular phone is replaced. Therefore, it is inconvenient for a user to update the software of a cellular phone by the conventional updating method.